we look ahead a few years, we see a future in which pings are generated not just by the millions per day, but by the tens and hundreds of millions. The blogosphere will continue to grow ‘€“ rapidly ‘€“ but we already note signs that RSS and the mechanics of feed-based publishing will extend well beyond the blogging perimeter, and be adopted as an enabling technology in areas like mainstream media publishing and corporate data distribution. In short, we believe that it won’€™t be long before terms like ping, feed, and trackback become part of the conventional lexicon for Internet publishing as a whole, not just the realm of blogs.

The purchase follows the acquisition of Weblogs Inc., to AOL for $25 million USD.